To Love Well Is the Work: A Rilke Lesson for the Year of the Fire Horse - A Reflection

To Love Well Is the Work: A Rilke Lesson for the Year of the Fire Horse How an Austrian poet's century-old wisdom speaks directly to this rare and demanding year.

It is never too late to bring attention to oneself, to ask for assistance from a therapeutic practitioner.

I invite you to have a conversation with me to see if EMDR is the appropriate therapy for you at this time of radical change, loss of relationships, combustion between opposite poles of opinion, and threats to your personal freedom.

To Love Well is the Work. Kindness is an asset. Forgiveness of one’s self judgement, and respect for others Are keys to loving well.

To respect oneself and one’s choices, admitting wrong doing when appropriate and lending a hand to one’s neighbor pave the road to better life for all.

Today, February 17, 2026, the world steps across the threshold of the Year of the Fire Horse — a cosmic event that arrives only once every 60 years.

The energy is unmistakable: bold, direct, high-speed, and uncompromising.

Horse years are culturally framed as more motion than pause, more momentum than contemplation, and the Fire Horse turns up the dial further still — energetic, determined, action-oriented.

And yet, into all that fire and forward motion, one quiet sentence from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke cuts straight to the bone: "For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."

Written in his Letters to a Young Poet (1904), the line has outlasted empires, wars, and every cultural revolution in between.

It is worth asking, in this particular year, why?

The Fire Horse is traditionally associated with courage and community.

Feng shui expert Anjie Cho notes that horses carry a need for companionship — "a sense of seeking out the support of your community, rather than just relying on yourself."

That is a remarkable quality to sit alongside Rilke's challenge, because his version of love is not passive or sentimental. It is work — the hardest work there is.

Rilke's claim is radical. He doesn't say love is the reward at the end of our labors— he says it is the point toward which all other effort is aimed. Career, self- discipline, creative ambition, personal growth — in his framework, these are rehearsals. The final exam is whether you can love a real, flawed, other human being with care and steadiness and attention.

The Fire Horse year, with its heavenly stem "Bing" — meaning "big sun" — paired with the earthly branch of the Horse, is considered a year of high visibility.

There is nowhere to hide.

What we have been neglecting — including the quality of our most intimate connections — tends to surface.

So what does it look like, concretely, to take Rilke's lesson into a Fire Horse year?

It looks like having the conversation you have been avoiding.

It looks like choosing presence over productivity.

It looks like resisting the year's restless energy long enough to actually listen — to a partner, a parent, a friend, a stranger — yourself... without already preparing your response.

My website is www.visionarypower.com, and my contact information is there.

May you surge ahead with passionate determination And with love in your heart.

The Year of the Fire Horse runs from February 17, 2026 to February 6, 2027.

Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet was first published in 1929, based on correspondence written between 1902 and 1908.